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Accelerating simulation of agent-based models on heterogeneous architectures

Published: 16 March 2013 Publication History

Abstract

The wide usage of GPGPU programming models and compiler techniques enables the optimization of data-parallel programs on commodity GPUs. However, mapping GPGPU applications running on discrete parts to emerging integrated heterogeneous architectures such as the AMD Fusion APU and Intel Sandy/Ivy bridge with the CPU and the GPU on the same die has not been well studied.
Classic time-step simulation applications represented by agent-based models have the intrinsic parallel structure that is a good fit for GPGPU architectures. However, when mapping these applications directly to the integrated GPUs, the performance may degrade due to less computation units and lower clock speed.
This paper proposes an optimization to the GPGPU implementation of the agent-based model and illustrates it in the traffic simulation example. The optimization adapts the algorithm by moving part of the workload to the CPU to leverage the integrated architecture and the on-chip memory bus which is faster than the PCIe bus that connects the discrete GPU and the host. The experiments on discrete AMD Radeon GPU and AMD Fusion APU demonstrate that the optimization can achieve 1.08--2.71x performance speedup on the integrated architecture over the discrete platform.

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Cited By

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  • (2019)A Survey on Agent-based Simulation Using Hardware AcceleratorsACM Computing Surveys10.1145/329104851:6(1-35)Online publication date: 28-Jan-2019
  • (2018)Exploring execution schemes for agent-based traffic simulation on heterogeneous hardwareProceedings of the 22nd International Symposium on Distributed Simulation and Real Time Applications10.5555/3330299.3330331(243-252)Online publication date: 15-Oct-2018
  • (2018)IPA (v1): a framework for agent-based modelling of soil water movementGeoscientific Model Development10.5194/gmd-11-2175-201811:6(2175-2187)Online publication date: 13-Jun-2018
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    cover image ACM Other conferences
    GPGPU-6: Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on General Purpose Processor Using Graphics Processing Units
    March 2013
    156 pages
    ISBN:9781450320177
    DOI:10.1145/2458523
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Publication History

    Published: 16 March 2013

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    Author Tags

    1. APU
    2. GPGPU
    3. agent-based model
    4. traffic simulation

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    GPGPU-6 Paper Acceptance Rate 15 of 37 submissions, 41%;
    Overall Acceptance Rate 57 of 129 submissions, 44%

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    Cited By

    View all
    • (2019)A Survey on Agent-based Simulation Using Hardware AcceleratorsACM Computing Surveys10.1145/329104851:6(1-35)Online publication date: 28-Jan-2019
    • (2018)Exploring execution schemes for agent-based traffic simulation on heterogeneous hardwareProceedings of the 22nd International Symposium on Distributed Simulation and Real Time Applications10.5555/3330299.3330331(243-252)Online publication date: 15-Oct-2018
    • (2018)IPA (v1): a framework for agent-based modelling of soil water movementGeoscientific Model Development10.5194/gmd-11-2175-201811:6(2175-2187)Online publication date: 13-Jun-2018
    • (2018)Exploring Execution Schemes for Agent-Based Traffic Simulation on Heterogeneous Hardware2018 IEEE/ACM 22nd International Symposium on Distributed Simulation and Real Time Applications (DS-RT)10.1109/DISTRA.2018.8601016(1-10)Online publication date: Oct-2018
    • (2017)Assessing the feasibility of OpenCL CPU implementations for agent-based simulationsProceedings of the 5th International Workshop on OpenCL10.1145/3078155.3078174(1-10)Online publication date: 16-May-2017
    • (2017)Parallelization Strategies for Spatial Agent-Based ModelsInternational Journal of Parallel Programming10.1007/s10766-015-0399-945:3(449-481)Online publication date: 1-Jun-2017
    • (2014)ad-heapProceedings of Workshop on General Purpose Processing Using GPUs10.1145/2588768.2576786(54-63)Online publication date: 1-Mar-2014
    • (2014)Modeling the Energy Efficiency of Heterogeneous ClustersProceedings of the 2014 Brazilian Conference on Intelligent Systems10.1109/ICPP.2014.41(321-330)Online publication date: 18-Oct-2014

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